A St. Paddy’s Day option if you’re plowed at a bar and want to go home with your car.

It is nearly midnight on a clear Friday. We are parked on
East Burnside Street outside Rontoms, our hazard lights flashing and our
windows down. The moon is full. We are looking for Dean.

“Are you a taxi?”
asks a lean man dressed in black who lurches to the passenger window.
He’s not Dean. He points, haphazardly, to the light-up car topper on the
white 2008 Volkswagen Jetta before saying, “Wait, are you Mothers
Against Drunk Driving?”

Nope, we’re neither
taxi service nor MADD—this February night I’m along with Ride On, a
four-year-old volunteer-run designated driver service that picks up
drunken Portlanders and shuttles them home weekend nights (and also this
Thursday, March 17, for St. Patrick’s Day) in their own car.

City transportation officials think it’s the only such drive-your-own-car-home service in Portland.

FREE RIDERS: Riders Adrienne Allaert and Alex Blair get a lift home on Saturday, March 12.

Credits: Thomas Oliver

Dean has called to
request a ride, but the dude is nowhere, and he’s not answering his cell
phone. We never find him. As for the other fellow dressed in black, we
decide against giving him a ride when we ask his destination.
“Broadway,” he burbles only semi-coherently. “Which quadrant?” we ask.
He crinkles his eyebrows. “Uh, which side of the river?” He doesn’t
remember.

That missed connection is the evening’s sole hiccup.

Between 11 pm and 4
am, we ferry seven groups, driving them from bars and house parties and
potlucks to their homes. The conceit behind Ride On is simple: One
reason people drive drunk is because they don’t want to leave their car
at the bar.

So for $15, Ride On
will dispatch your own designated driver to your location (sorry,
suburbanites—all pick-ups and drop-offs must be at Portland addresses)
and drive you home, in your own car. Ride On response times average 30
minutes to an hour.

Operations director
Chrystle Nordin, who coordinates 90-plus volunteers, says Ride On served
about 1,000 people in 2009. Last year, that figure jumped 60 percent to
1,600. All positions in the nonprofit are unpaid; some of the
volunteers have had friends killed by drunken drivers, others appreciate
the social community of volunteers and many simply find it a good
service and want to help out. The $15 ride fee goes toward insurance,
walkie-talkie fees and expenses at their Southeast Morrison Street
office.

I ride with Nordin
and one other volunteer on this Friday night. Joaquin Gutierrez is our
first pick-up. I wriggle into the backseat of his slightly
stale-smelling gray 2003 Hyundai Elantra, knocking discarded Dr. Pepper
bottles and a baseball catcher’s mask out of the way.

“Ride On is the best
thing ever, because it gets your car home,” Gutierrez says when we pick
him up from Northeast Alberta Street outside the Nest. “I probably use
it every other weekend.”

Nordin says Ride On welcomes such repeat customers.

“The message behind
Ride On isn’t exactly ‘Go ahead and get wasted and call us,’” she says.
“We aren’t servicing the wasted population. We’re encouraging
responsible drinking, servicing the people that are making a conscious
decision to get home safely and responsibly.”

We haul out to
Gutierrez’s home in St. Johns, discussing his work for a beer
distributor, Portland and Seattle’s relative merits (“I hate Seattle,”
Gutierrez says) and the Chicago Cubs.

Wide-ranging
conversation continues with other passengers we pick up later that
night—we chat with riders about meth, Mexican food, ghost bikes, Chuck
Norris, golf, microbreweries, public transit and panna cotta. We drive
one couple—Josh Daugherty wears skinny jeans and Ashley Pomlauer glitter
around her eyes—clear to outer East Portland.

One customer, Joe
Dougherty, a sweatpants-clad chef whose black 2011 Toyota Tacoma pickup
has a flowered sheet draped over the backseat, thanks us no less than
four times—before we even drop him at his front door in Northeast
Portland. Such gratitude, Nordin says, is typical, and one of the perks
of the volunteer gig.

There are occasional
horror tales—Nordin says one set of volunteers recently found a patron
face down in his own vomit. His car was low on fuel and he had no cash
to pay for the gas or the ride. Nordin herself has ferried a fair number
of squabbling couples. Another longtime volunteer, Daniel Lewis, said
he once shuttled a woman who couldn’t remember her address. They circled
the block a half-dozen times before she finally recognized her house.

Before
my ride-along, I had expected wild antics and salacious stories
spilling from Ride On’s intoxicated patrons. There’s not so much of
this. Sure, one guy dishes on his freeloading sister. Another group lets
out earsplitting shrieks when we arrive. Moderately drunk people say
semi-stupid things. On the whole, though, the evening is surprisingly
subdued.

Around 3 am, we go to
the Goodfoot on Southeast Stark Street to pick up Josh Gilchrist and Jo
Posey, one of the night’s last rides. They have a rented red Hyundai
Sonata—“some 18-year-old girl” totaled their other car, Posey said.
Posey craves Taco Bell. Gilchrist promises to make her “fake Taco Bell”
when they get home. Posey yawns.

FACT: Co-founders Scott Conger and Joshua Bernard
launched Ride On in January 2007. The two had previously run a
for-profit service called Meteor, which dispatched drivers on motorized
folding scooters to pick up inebriated Portlanders. But insurance costs
were astronomical (and rides ran upward of $75), so they shut down
Meteor and reorganized as a nonprofit.

EDITOR'S NOTE:Plastered on St.
Paddy’s? Call 235-RIDE. You must have your own car, and pick-ups and
drop-offs must be in Portland. Ride On runs year-round on Fridays,
Saturdays and some holidays from 11 pm to 3 am. Want to volunteer or
donate? Visit rideonportland.org.